


Combs and Curls

by newsical



Category: Batman - All Media Types, DCU, DCU (Comics), Nightwing (Comics)
Genre: Baby Dick Grayson, Bruce Wayne is a Good Parent, Dick Grayson Needs a Hug, Gen, Young Bruce Wayne
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-03
Updated: 2021-01-03
Packaged: 2021-03-10 22:48:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,434
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28434894
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/newsical/pseuds/newsical
Summary: He ran one hand, then another, through his still-knotted hair. It was unsalvageable. It was nothing of the ringlets that papá tugged at after a perfect landing, nothing like the perfect coils that maman so painstakingly arranged while humming a song of the green rolling hills from her home.-After Dick's parents’ deaths, Bruce Wayne teaches Dick Grayson how to care for his curls.
Relationships: Dick Grayson & Alfred Pennyworth, Dick Grayson & Bruce Wayne, Dick Grayson & John Grayson, Dick Grayson & Mary Grayson
Comments: 6
Kudos: 114





	Combs and Curls

**Author's Note:**

> a huge thank you to @dustorange for encouraging this story from beginning to end!
> 
> basically i love bruce and dick's dynamic which is somewhere between brother-friend-parent, so picture bruce as like early-ish twenties bruce learning to live with a very sad and independent dick grayson in the wake of losing such loving parents. the little things often make the biggest impact when losing people you love, and for dick as a kid, this manifests in how he takes care of his hair. i took the liberty of embellishing a lil bit on the part of the graysons ! they're really cool and i like them :)

Mary Grayson never used anything other than a four-pronged, wide tooth comb for her curls. She said she found it one day, lodged in a gnarled knot of a great willow tree, and that it was a gift of goodwill from mother earth. On its curve wrapped a dancing vine with plump, arched leaves and veins etched delicately in the gold metal. When her hair ran like ink down her back, sleek with conditioner that smelled of rose, she dragged it languidly through the strands. When she smiled brilliantly in the photos before shows, it twinkled from behind her ear - to offset the swooping side-part, she said. When she flew, she tucked it into the low knot of curls at the nape of her neck so that she would be like the vines, leaping and twirling and reaching.

When Dick Grayson arrived at Wayne Manor, his curls were frazzled and had lost their luster. His sides ached, whether from red-and-white skateboard shoes that found him on his first night at that center (and every one after) or the shadow of where his mother should be. A man shaped like a lily, tall and thin legged and white on top, stood next to the man from the circus. Mr. Wayne, Bruce Wayne, mountain shaped and just as stony. He hesitantly reached out towards Dick, hand hovering over the ratty tussle on his head, before falling to his shoulder. Unlike his mother, who rubbed the same oil to smooth her hands and face and hair, Bruce’s hands were criss-crossed and battered with scars and swallowed his whole shoulder. If he squeezed, Dick thought, he could turn his bones to pulp, like breakfast juice. But his palms were soft, where _maman’s_ callused and broke with the rope, and guided Dick gently to the mansion that leered down at him.

It took Alfred, _el hombre de azucena_ , two-and-a-half days to convince Dick to shower. He draped a fluffy white towel over Dick’s arm and left him stranded in a bathroom that dwarfed his family’s trailer. Dick washed the grime and boot scuffs off of his skin, but the jewel-purple and indigo bruises only set more firmly with the warm water. He emerged from the shower to find an ornate, silver brush with ivory bristles staring at him from the counter. Dick stared back and poked it. It had a shock of soft, ivory bristles that looked like the whale’s teeth from his encyclopedia. Then, a knock came from the door, and Dick deposited his towel to go and answer it.

Over a breakfast of cinnamon porridge some weeks down the line, Bruce warned him that they would have to cut his hair soon if it got any more tangled. Dick screamed at him and threw a punch, but Bruce wasn’t Caleb Yavuz from two trailers down. He took the pelts for half a minute before circling his fingers around Dick’s wrists and suggesting that he just run a brush through his hair after a shower. It wasn’t a threat, Dick told himself, but it felt like one. After his shower, “to cool off,” said Bruce, he pulled the brush out of the drawer. It had been buried beneath the hard soaps that smelled like a sharp, cold forest and the gardenia lotion that made him choke on its pungent perfume. Dick turned it over in his hand and ran his fingers over the great globs of silver that were supposed to be lovely flowers. He sighed and tugged it through his hair.

It was not the gentle, rhythmic stroke of his mother’s comb; for the next eternity, Dick was met with resistance at every strand. By the time he threw down the brush, his arms were taut and racing with burning flames. He cast a miserable glance towards the mirror to find some parts flat and some mushrooming half a foot from his head. Each tendril looked distraught, caught midway between curl and straight. The thin bristles grinned at him, and the thick expanse of ice in the center of Dick’s chest fractured and shattered. Hot tears ran down his face. Dick closed the door and cried.

When the flush of shame had mostly drained from his face, Dick padded down the stairs for dinner. Running his toes over the ridge of the bottom step, Dick steeled himself. He wasn’t some kid that melted like a popsicle over nothing; he was a Grayson, and Graysons were strong. He ran one hand, then another, through his still-knotted hair. It was unsalvageable. It was nothing of the ringlets that _papá_ tugged at after a perfect landing, nothing like the perfect coils that _maman_ so painstakingly arranged while humming a song of the green rolling hills from her home. Dick pulled the hem of his shirt taut and dismounted from the steps.

Alfred set a steaming bowl of emerald-green beans at the end of the long table, and Dick took a seat. Bruce studied him with the twitch of a thick eyebrow. He was probably trying to be subtle, Dick knew, but the peculiar rearrangement of the stony expression was like watching the sky shift with a shrug of Atlas’s shoulders. Dick hugged his knees to his chest.

“Dick. You...brushed your hair,” Bruce finally spoke, his last word wobbling between question and statement. Dick tucked a strand behind his ear, nodded, and shrank down further in his seat. Alfred brought out a steak.

“It looks different,” Bruce offered after several beats too many of silence.

“Different isn’t good.” A rogue tear plummeted from eyelash to cheek, and Dick choked on a sob that tried to escape his throat. Another rose, and then another, and Dick swallowed them all down until the pressure of a roaring river, swirling waters, built and spilled over into a great flood.

He would never hear his father’s brassy laugh, see him shake his head and smile, “ _mijo_ …”

Never again would _maman_ bury him in her soft chest and rose scent or pull the sheets over Dick as he lay between his parents after a bad dream.

No more kisses pressed to his mother’s dark chocolate curls upon his own head - the curls he had ruined, frayed and broken more brutally than the ropes of the snapped trapeze.

When she fell, her comb had glittered against the brown sand below, light shining as that of her eyes faded. When she fell, they took her comb, her gift from the mother earth, and captured it in a plastic bag. Evidence, so like _la evidencia_ from Venezia and _papá’s novelas_. His parents, too, they stole in plastic bags, but they were wrinkled black and hid the ghostly pallor of dead faces, the crumpled angles of the once beautiful lines of their limbs, the tang of blood. Zip. All gone.

“Dick,” Bruce crouched in front of his small, balled limbs. If he tucked himself tightly enough he could fly through the air again, disappear into a speck of dust, leave the world that became so bitterly cold ever since his parents had been ripped from it.

“Dick,” Bruce repeated and reached for his arm. His fingers twitched like the trembling legs of a colt. “What can I do?”

“Nothing!” Dick’s cry reverberated around the silent dining room and sounded loudly off the long, empty table. “Nothing,” he said, more softly, to not startle Bruce and his uncertain hands, and dropped his head on his knees.

-

On a Sunday morning, Bruce wandered into the TV room. Dick had tried to run away the night before, but Batman, or Bruce-at-night, told him no and carried him home. Dick said it was called kid-napping, but that didn’t make sense - neither did Batman and not Man-of-Bat, or living room, so it was the TV room now. Dick wound a blanket tighter around himself and returned his attention to the cartoons. To see Bugs Bunny’s mouth line up with his words was strange; when the circus traveled, the cartoon mouth curled around different shapes than the words he said. The English was still the hardest, even with the sound matching Bugs talking, and Dick had to concentrate.

Bruce shifted on the couch. He made an avalanche of noise, and Dick turned his ear towards the TV.

_“And if he was a rabbit, what would you do?”_

Bruce coughed once, then again, and Dick didn’t know the English equivalent of _salud_ , and saying “health” didn’t seem to make sense, and Elmer Fudd was pulling out a shotgun and he’d missed it - 

“Dick.” Bruce did not cough but shifted his weight on the couch again. “Alfred is preparing a list for the store. Is there anything you would like?”

Dick thought for a moment and suggested ice cream, mint chip, please. Bruce nodded, but his silence bled into the seat cushions and swirled around Dick’s blanket.

“Yes?”

Bruce cleared his throat. “Alfred is sending out for some new shampoo for me, as I ran out. I realize that the shampoo and the brushes in your bathroom may not be conducive to your hair type…” Dick stared at Bruce and scooted closer. For all his mountain shape, Bruce floundered and sank like a stone.

“What, Bruce.” Dick rested a hand on his knee. His muscles twitched beneath Dick’s fingers, but his form remained steady, unflinching. He took a deep breath.

“My mother,” he began. “I lost my mother when I was your age. She had hair like yours, and she taught me how to brush and wash it. In case I grew into her curls.”

He ran a hand through a dark patch of hair, sleek as a ribbon.

“But you didn’t.”

“I did not. I hoped that, maybe, but I did not,” he sighed. Bruce Wayne was a man of sighs. Sighs and size. “I can show you, though. If you’d like.”

Mary Grayson, _maman_ , had not taught him. She had thought, probably, that she could teach him later on, that there would be shows and quiet mornings to come, that they had time.

“Okay.”

Bruce Wayne smoothed his hands over his knees and nodded sharply, so sharp that he could slice his neck with his chin, Dick thought. He reached towards Dick’s head again, hand suspended, before lightly ruffling Dick’s morning tangles. Not _papá_ , but more like the circus. More like home.

-

Dick got what Bruce called “clotheslined” by Bruce when he tried to run in the bathroom to shower. He waited for Dick to finish coughing dry air, then said that he had to break up tangles before showering.

“You could have told me,” Dick scowled and rubbed his collarbones, sore and light as bird bones. Bruce smirked and began working his fingers through Dick’s hair.

Bruce waited outside the bathroom door while Dick showered and yelled instructions over the drum of the water. The new bottles were the same dull silver, _shampooing au lait d’avoine (comme sophistiqué!) et baume après-shampooing_ , but thankfully labeled in French. _Maman_ always said that the Americans begged for French beauty secrets, always with a wink.

“And leave the conditioner in,” Bruce called over the dribble of the faucet. Dick frowned at his slick curls but bundled a towel around himself and took a seat on the stool that Bruce had stolen from Alfred. He held a green comb in his hand, wide-toothed like _maman’s_ , and Dick shimmied on the stool.

Some people have the voice of an angel, but not _maman_ , whose voice was brassy and smooth as a copper pot, and not Bruce. Puffs of air carried fragments of song with Bruce’s exhales as he worked the comb and gently threaded his fingers through sections of hair. Dick tried not to gawk or startle Bruce back to his silence; if only his sighs, too, were tangled with music. Bruce nudged Dick back towards the shower to rinse his hair and greeted him with Gotham Knights t-shirt when he stepped back out.

“What,” Dick said and cocked an eyebrow at the shirt. Bruce glanced down at the rumpled gray fabric.

“If you use this to dry it, your hair won’t frizz.”

“I thought you are _un multimillonario_.”

A smile slithered across Bruce’s lips. He tossed the shirt at Dick.

“Bend over, like that, and scrunch your hair. Good, now…”

-

Bruce and Dick compromised on an outfit for dinner, which included Dick’s new elephant sweater. “To compliment the curls,” Dick said with a grin at Bruce as he let the sleeves tumble over his hands. Bruce huff-laughed and gave Dick’s hair a final scrunch. Scrunch, Dick thought, was a good word.

“Why don’t we show Alfred?”

“Yes!” Dick jumped and twisted, racing towards the stairs. “Last one there is a...hamburger!”

As it turned out, Dick was the hamburger, but only because Bruce used his bat-skills to stop Dick from using the railing-jump detour to the dining room. 

_“Not_ fair,” Dick crossed his arms. “You are a cheat.” 

“No,” Bruce snaked a hand out to flick Dick in the chest. Dick slapped it away. “I am Batman.” Bruce straightened at the snap of Alfred’s shiny shoes. 

“Why, Master Dick.” Alfred offered a soft smile. “You look as dashing as a young knight-errant.”

Dick twirled to give Alfred a proper view of the _Grayson et Bruce_ curls. Neat as folds of silk, the fragile lines at the corners of Alfred’s eyes creased, and he extended a hand to neaten a renegade ringlet. A familiar warmth shivered in Dick’s chest as Alfred’s weathered hand settled along the curve of his cheek. 

“My dear boy, Master Bruce and I thought it appropriate to give you this.” 

Bruce held out a small comb, deep green and cracked by gold marble veins. Four pronged, like _maman’s_ , but its surface was unmarred, as though smoothed to perfection by a toss through the sea. Four scalloped ridges marked its curve. 

“Bruce,” Dick whispered. “I have five fingers.” 

“Thumb goes on the other side,” Bruce whispered in reply, and he curled Dick’s fingers around the comb. 

It was stone where _maman’s_ had been metal, weighted where hers had been light, but both were of the earth, and both were gifts. This comb was not his mother’s - that was entombed in some police hall, gathering dust - and she would never comb his hair again but in memory. But Bruce was here, and Alfred, too, and despite the scars that roughened Bruce’s fingertips, he had cared for Dick’s curls like _maman_. 

No, this comb was heavier than his mother’s; it was new where her silver had blossomed with tarnish. They were not the same. This comb belonged to Dick.


End file.
